


sweet water and other nectar

by valleyofmidnight



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Americana, Blood and Gore, Churches & Cathedrals, Kidnapping, M/M, Murder, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, ciel is like 14, preacher sebastian, protestantism apparently isn't a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:41:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26846050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valleyofmidnight/pseuds/valleyofmidnight
Summary: He glances at you every time his tongue slips on the word 'sin'. You can't possibly know much about sin, but you see something peculiar in his eyes-- unnatural, inhuman. A flash of jewel-pink. Barely a moment. You start seeing it in your dreams.
Relationships: Sebastian Michaelis/Ciel Phantomhive
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	sweet water and other nectar

**Author's Note:**

> been working on this fic very slowly for the past couple week (only reason i'm able to post again this soon). inspired heavily by devil all the time !! unbeta'd so excuse any mistakes please <3

The mosquitoes gathered in thin swarms, and the flies always followed closely behind. They were the only sign of the dying summer, the air cool, the trees changing colors at their edges. It was warm, but not like the August days of the previous month; the heat didn't claw into you, threaten you. It swung past on generous winds, pooled on blades of grass. If you stepped across the lawn without shows, the grass would have an almost silk feeling, made tender by the sunlight. 

Of course, the summer goes in its little while. Across its corpse lay the strict edges of school days, the cut line of 8 o'clock in the morning to 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the bells echoing in the narrow halls of your school. Across the burnt edges of summer lay your last year of junior high. 

It was a weird year already-- the old preacher's up and gone from the church, his wife missing alongside him. A new preacher was supposedly coming in the next few weeks, but services were put on hold until then. All the little pious girls were near revolting, clinging to their worn bibles with their painted nails, crying eyes. They held prayers every evening, whispering their hopes, laying their dreams on a man they hadn't even met yet. 

You, in all your small apathy, didn't care much for the services anyway, it'd been years since you'd done as much as prayed, but Lizzy liked them, read you bible passages every night from her bed while you laid in yours. On the opposite side of the room, her voice carried, and rose, and made her sound like an angel dictating from above. So you listened.

And when she was finished talking about Jesus and the fig tree, or whatever parable it was that night, she would click her tongue, close the book, and lay it on her bedside table. It'd be silent for just a moment and then she'd say, "When do you think that preacher's gonna get here?"  
And tonight you said, "Whenever the Lord decides, I guess."

The preacher shows up the first week of class. Shiny, obnoxious car, starched collar, polished shoes. The dust rolls out of his path when he walked by, the air grows crisp and cold. All the girls fawn over him, and you can't tell if it was them glad to finally have a preacher in this dirt-town again or if it was the way he smiled at all them. The way he seemed to pay extra attention to girls with too-short skirts and too much lip gloss, like he could sense the temptation on their skin. Like he was encouraging it. 

And then, every time, without fail, he catches your eye, like you were magnetic north, his eyes a compass, knew exactly where you were on the edges of the crowd of girls following him into the church, or in the pews. He glances at you every time his tongue slips on the word 'sin'. You can't possibly know much about sin, but you see something peculiar in his eyes-- unnatural, inhuman. A flash of jewel-pink. Barely a moment. You start seeing it in your dreams. 

Your dreams were always something unusual. Something you would mull over a million times, but would never speak about to anyone. Flashes of blood, and skin, and guns. You'd only ever heard a gunshot far off, when you lived in that small house on the hill, the poachers running around in the forest behind your yard, shooting quail and rabbits. In your dreams, the bullets would find a person to dig into, to bleed apart. And you would be holding the weapon, a handgun, the barrel would be hot enough to brand you for the rest of your life. 

You wake up in a sweat every time, slip out of the room silently (if you woke Lizzy up, you would never forgive yourself). You go down to the water pump, smash the soles of your poorly tied shoes into the mud (and think about the life your parents would've wanted for you, presumably one with indoor plumbing). The grass bends around your feet, the cicadas respond to your silent self, tracking through the sparse brush and woods. You forgot about the pump, about the water. Now all you're thinking about was seeing the stars.

When it was dark, pitch dark, and everyone was asleep, you could go to this patch of grass, greener than anything in the daytime, an ocean of its own in the night, and you'd lay down under this massive tree, leaves and branches making a ceiling over you. You'd slip between the real and the romantic, teetering over that porous line where you end and the blades of grass begin. You must've read that in a poem somewhere. You thought of it every time you went out. 

So when you see that same pink hue, a flash, a flare in the distance-- you chalk it up to your imagination and close your eyes. The night is one of the last properly warm ones, where the air is thick with the uncertainty of Fall, the hopes for the rest of the year, the tension of all the change. You hear a soft thud (an animal, or some teenagers bumbling about).

You head back soon enough, when the horizon starts tinting that white-gray of early morning. You slog through the dew and the sharp morning air. Everyone was still asleep when you got back inside, and besides the half-baked footprints by the front door, there's no sign you ever woke up. You slip under the covers, and your body sinks into the mattress with little resistance, fall asleep the same.

The whispers start the next day, and by next Sunday the words _found dead in the woods, mutilated, satanic_ ring through the crowd so fast, hushed tones, clutched pearls, that it was useless to talk or think about anything else. Lizzy had been in tears since that morning, the victim some girl in her class. 

The front door of the church opens and everyone falls into silence. The preacher's footsteps cut through the air, through the middle aisle, up to the pulpit. He moves as though not held down by gravity but by his own will, like his borders a fluid-- fuzzy lines of sweet water. His eyes glow in the sun, more red than brown.   
His presence settles on the crowd, the air slips into something warm, awful. Your stomach churns. You know immediately who killed that girl. 

His sermon is smooth as silk, his voice a low amber. Nothing like the glint in his eye, the blood you're sure is on his hands. He stands tall in his place, a smile on his face that could easily be holy to an eye searching for evidence of God. You wonder when you stopped being one of those people.

The church bus is packed full this Sunday, full of girls and their moms, not wanting to walk home by themselves. You recognize a few of them the way you recognize your daddy's portrait. You wonder about their obituary. Lizzy, in some far off way, is in the back of your head. _how morbid_ , she says, _awful to think such a thing_. You suppose she's right. 

Real-Lizzy taps you on the shoulder on the way out the church, all small smile and doe-eyes. They're still red, puffy, but she looks sweet more than messy. A state she's near perfected since her parents died. She says she wants to spend some time at their graves, so she'll meet you at the house. Which means you'll walk her there, and walk her back, and she'll fuss the whole time, but be silently glad there was someone living to listen to her twentieth reading of Matthew.

The ants swarm around your sneakers (cheap, thrifted pair from the Goodwill miles away from here; Aunt Red got them when you first got here and you hadn't outgrown them yet). You think about what they would do if you were a rotting body instead, like that girl before she was found. You think about the patterns they would make on your corpse, what parts of you they would carry off, what parts they would leave for the big crows that roosted somewhere around here. You wonder if crows even touch dead bodies. 

That, of course, makes you think about your own parents. Bodies left burnt to ash long before you found them. Carried off by strangers (neighbors, you'd come to find out, but you hadn't met them before then). Left to rot yourself-- It was weeks before anyone came to claim you. A sick grandma and a woman dressed in the most obnoxious shade of red you had ever seen. You could hardly handle the car ride there (the rumble of the car shaking up something inside you, the quiet giving space for all the packed down feelings in your stomach). 

You wonder if the ants ever even got to your parents. If the birds smelled the fire and flew far away, disinterested. You wish you had gotten a close look at them, been allowed to go over every detail hiding in their burns. It would've been better than wondering about it, you think. 

Lizzy's voice dips low, and you know that means she's saying her own private prayers. You don't wanna interrupt them with your bugs and birds. You look back over at the church, standing tall, if a little crooked, foundation surely giving out by now. That preacher doesn't belong in its four walls. You know he has a little house a bit farther in town, but that doesn't seem suited to him either. 

The more you think about it, the more he seems from another world altogether. 

He reads at the funeral. How fucking gaudy, you think. But everyone's under his spell. He could start forming a cult with an audience like this.

He catches you at the end of the next service. All smiles and stained-glass-filtered sunlight. He says you don't understand his vision at this church, that he sees how lost you are, wants to help. You almost laugh. He mentions your parents. 

You don't talk about your parents. 

But this close, alone in the church, it doesn't feel like a personal insult. It's almost enough to convince you he cares. Almost. The remaining part of you, furious and dense, wants to hit him.

But no one would be on your side if you kicked him in the groin and ran out of the church-- You can hear Lizzy telling you to open your heart and listen to what the Lord has to tell you. Your eye twitches at the thought. You breathe in, then out. 

Sebastian reaches forward, places a hand on the top of your head. It's familiar, nostalgic, and it takes you a moment to place it. It's the way your dad would pat you on the head. 

You take a step back, eyes wide, heart beating out of your chest. There was no way-- But in that moment, all of Sebastian's features line up with how you remember your father, and you get the strange feeling that this is what he came here for all along. 

He tells you to follow him-- he wants to show you something. You're too stunned to do anything else. And Lizzy's waiting for you, she knows where you are, so if you turn up missing, she'll know where to look. You know that isn't a good reason to follow him. You follow him anyway. 

There's a feeling that you understand him, see him in a way no one else does. And you don't think he'll really hurt you. It's hard to imagine yourself really hurt by someone like him. In that moment, it's hard to imagine Sebastian hurting anyone at all. He leads you through the church, to the back, and his steps are so smooth, come so easily, the ground coming up to support him as opposed to him pressing down.

You keep trying to collect your thoughts, keep trying to focus on the heart of the matter-- _he's a killer, he's a monster_ \-- but you can't get very far before you're staring at the back of his head, wondering where he's taking you. You're at the back of the church now, and he opens a door that leads to the back storage.  
It's dark, dusty, smells like incense and dirt. Fear sits in the back of your head like a campfire, smoke rising, but you can hardly feel the burn of it. Fear doesn't exist in the same room as Sebastian-- And it _should_. You should be running out of the building and running home. 

Sebastian shuts the door behind both of you, and says, calmly, as though he's talking about an oncoming storm, "I know what you think of me." As if he isn't talking about murder accusations. As if it some spirited imagination of a teenage boy, and not the most likely answer. You should be running. "None of it is true."  
And the statement washes over you very simply. You cling to a small truth-- Sebastian is not to be trusted-- but it provides little protection against his way of speaking, especially now that you're the only one he's speaking to. His words wrap around the air itself, slip across the space between you two and past our tongue your tongue, down your throat. There's nothing you could say, even if you had mountains of evidence against him. 

And your head is foggy, and you smell something almost sweet. Like fruit rotting. Sebastian just smiles.

Somehow, all that comes to mind in this state, is the homework you have due tomorrow, how you can't disappoint your teachers because they already look at you with pity in their eyes. But you can hardly keep your own eyes open-- that sickly sweet scent overwhelming your brain. You see a flash of jewel-pink. 

You don't even feel the pain when you wake up. All you feel is blood sticking to your skin, the night hot and thick. Your throat is dry. Your gums hurt. You can feel a hand on your thigh, firm but not bruising. You can't remember when you took your pants off. 

Sebastian doesn't say a word, and you don't see him, and you know it's him before you remember how you got here. You can feel his tongue inside you.   
You should be running, but your brain is completely shut down, all the flips and switches that would move your body, all the parts that connect you to your body now severed. But you can still feel. You feel both his hands (one on your thigh, right; one on your hip) and you can feel his tongue (and consequently, his lips, his face). He's bent your legs, pushed them up and back, spread them apart. Arranged you how he's like you.

And you can feel your wrists, but not your own hands. They're pressed together, tied with some itchy rope. And you can feel your stomach. The pain starts slow, almost comforting, then ramps up the longer your awake. Your head pounds, your eyes ache, your stomach feels raw and burning, like it's been cut into. And you can feel the blood, yes. Hot, sticky, dripping, you think. Must be. 

And then, manically, pleasure hits all at once, right alongside the stinging, the burning. Right alongside your head feeling full of bugs and leaves. You can feel Sebastian nudge against you, spit and warmth. You fucking hate it. And that feeling of hate is the only thing clear enough to hold onto.   
So as he opens you up, breaks you into a mess of blood and horrible sound, you cling to every ounce of hate you have in you. You imagine the flames that burnt down your house, and you become them. 

You know it won't save you. And you know Sebastian will get away with anything he does to you. But it's all you have. When he cuts into you again, more knife than man, and when he forces his way inside you, presses his teeth to your skin, holds either side of your small chest (hands big enough for his thumbs to nearly meet in the center), you imagine him burning. 

You don't know when exactly he leaves, but you know when he's gone. When you start feeling empty and uncontained. You know you're alone. You can't even collect yourself enough to cry while he's away, and he's back too soon to think of escaping.

  
He says something about you, and the tone is enough to make you sick on its own. His hands are back on you, his mouth against your chest. You close your eyes. You wonder if the birds will find you, and if they do, what parts of you they'll scavenge, and what parts they'll avoid. You think about the bible, and whatever god is letting this happen to you. You think about the people who'll call it an act of wrath-- some were saying that first girl was a whore, got what was coming to her. Or maybe you'll haunt that little town for the rest of eternity, have to watch Lizzy grow up and get married, watch Aunt Red grow old and defined. Then watch them all die. 

You think that maybe you're accepting death, maybe it's alright to die in the early days of Autumn, when the flies were thinning out, and the mosquitoes wouldn't bother the men who find your body. You think that maybe some people were born just to be buried, and you, with a family history of tragedy, shouldn't be surprised that it's your turn. 

Sebastian cuts open your chest first, and a new wave of blood pours out of you. You imagine him eating your heart. He cuts your throat next, and the two wounds bleed into each other. The two wounds mark rivers. You can taste the blood, but you stop feeling pain altogether, and soon after, stop feeling anything at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> pls do leave kudos n comments <3


End file.
